Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Tommy carried the scissors and the cereal to his room. There was half an inch of mostly crumbs left in the wax-paper bag, and he munched them dutifully. As he had done every morning for the last week, he studied the text printed on the back panel of the box, which described the scientifically formulated merits of the cereal in sober tones and which he now knew by heart. When he was through, he balled up the bag and threw it into the wastebasket. He picked up the scissors and carefully cut the back panel off the box. He laid it flat on his desk. With a pencil and a ruler, he drew a box around every instance of the words "Post Toasties." Then he took the scissors and cut on the lines he had marked. He took the panel, with its eleven rectangular holes, and fit it over the purported list of magic tricks from Tannen's.

That was how he learned that he was to catch the 10:04 train at the Bloomtown LIRR station on December 3, wearing an eye patch that would be supplied, under cover of constituting part of a spurious trick called Pieces o' Eight, in a second letter from Joe. Tommy was to sit in the last car, at the back, transfer at Jamaica, disembark at Penn Station, then walk the two long blocks to, of all places, the Empire State Building. He was to ride the elevator to the seventy-second floor, go to Suite 7203, and rap out his initials on the door in Morse code. If he encountered some family friend or other adult who questioned him and his destination, he was to point to the eye patch and say, simply, "Ophthalmologist."

Every Thursday for the next seven months, Tommy followed the routine established by that first secret letter from Joe. He left the house at eight forty-five, like every day, and started walking toward William Floyd Junior High, where he was in the seventh grade. At the corner of Darwin Avenue, however, he turned left instead of right, slipped through the Marchettis' backyard, crossed Rutherford Drive, and then took his sweet time (unless it was raining) ambling across the half-built east side of Bloomtown toward the bland new cinder-block-and-steel structure that had replaced the old Manticock station. He spent the day with Cousin Joe, in his strange digs nine hundred feet above Fifth Avenue, and left at three o'clock. Then, again following Joe's original prescription, he stopped outside Reliant Office Supplies on Thirty-third Street and typed out an excuse to hand to the principal, Mr. Savarese, the next morning, on a piece of paper that Joe had already furnished with a perfect simulacrum of Rosa Clay's signature.

In the first months, Tommy loved everything about the trips into New York. The cloak-and-dagger protocols, the risk of capture, and the soaring view from the windows of Joe's home could not have been better designed to appeal to the mind of an eleven-year-old boy who spent large parts of every day pretending to pose as the secret identity of a super-powered humanoid insect. He loved, first of all, the ride into the city. As with many lonely children, his problem was not solitude itself but that he was never left free to enjoy it. There were always well-meaning adults trying to jolly him, to improve and counsel him, to bribe and cajole and bully him into making friends, speaking up, getting some fresh air; teachers poking and wheedling with their facts and principles, when all he really needed was to be handed a stack of textbooks and left alone; and, worst of all, other children, who could not seem to play their games without including him if they were cruel ones or, if their games were innocent, pointedly keeping him out. Tommy's loneliness had found a strangely happy expression in the pitch and rumble of the LIRR trains, the stale breath of the heat blowers, the warm oatmeal smell of cigarettes, the sere featureless prospect from the windows, the hours given over entirely to himself, his book, and his imaginings. He also loved the city itself. Coming to and leaving Cousin Joe's, he would gorge himself on hot dogs and cafeteria pie, price cigarette lighters and snap-brim hats in store windows, follow the pushboys with their rustling racks of furs and trousers. There were sailors and prizefighters; there were bums, sad and menacing, and ladies in piped jackets with dogs in their handbags. Tommy would feel the sidewalks hum and shudder as the trains rolled past beneath him. He heard men swearing and singing opera. On a sunny day, his peripheral vision would be spangled with light winking off the chrome headlights of taxicabs, the buckles on ladies' shoes, the badges of policemen, the handles of pushcart lunch-wagons, the bulldog ornaments on the hoods of irate moving vans. This was Gotham City, Empire City, Metropolis. Its skies and rooftops were alive with men in capes and costumes, on the lookout for wrongdoers, saboteurs, and Communists. Tommy was the Rug, on solitary patrol in New York City, soaring up from the underground like a cicada, hopping on his mighty hind legs along Fifth Avenue in hot pursuit of Dr. Hate or the Finagler, creeping unnoticed as an ant amid the hurrying black-and-gray herds of briefcase-carrying humans, whose crude mammalian existences he had sworn to protect and defend, before at last dropping in on the secret aerial lair of one of his fellow masked crime-fighters, whom he sometimes dubbed the Eagle but who went more generally, in Tommy's fancy, by the moniker Secretman.

Secretman lived in a two-room office suite with four windows that looked out toward Bloomtown and Greenland. He had a desk, a chair, a drafting table, a stool, an armchair, a floor lamp, a complicated multi-band radio array festooned with yards of rambling antenna, and a special little cabinet whose many shallow drawers were filled with pens, pencils, twisted tubes of paint, erasers. There was no telephone; nor was there any stove, icebox, or proper bed.

"It's illegal," Cousin Joe told Tommy, the first time he visited. "You're not allowed to live in an office building. That's why you can't tell anyone I'm here."

Even then, before he learned the depth and extent of Secretman's superhuman powers of self-concealment, Tommy did not entirely believe this explanation. He sensed from the first, though he could not have expressed it-at his age, both the name and the experience of grief were not so much foreign to as latent in him, and as yet undetected-that something was the matter with, or had happened to, Joe. But he was too thrilled with his cousin's style of life, and the opportunity it afforded, to think the problem over too carefully. He watched as Joe went to a door on the other side of the room and opened it. It was a supply closet. There were stacks of paper and bottles of ink and other supplies. There were also a folded cot, an electric hot plate, two boxes of clothes, a canvas garment bag, and a small porcelain sink.

"Isn't there a janitor?" Tommy asked him on the second trip, having given the question some consideration. "Or a guard?"

"The janitor comes at five minutes before midnight, and I make sure everything is all right before he gets here. The guard and I are old friends by now."

Joe answered all of Tommy's questions about the particulars of his life, and showed him all of the work he had done since leaving the comic book business. But he declined to tell Tommy how long he had been holed up in the Empire State Building, and why he stayed there, and for what reason he kept his return a secret. He would not say why he never left his rooms except to purchase those supplies that could not be delivered, often wearing a false beard and sunglasses, or to pay regular visits to Tannen's back room, or why, one afternoon in July, he had made an exception and gone all the way out to Long Island. These were the mysteries of Secretman. Such questions had occurred to Tommy, in any case, only in a fragmentary and inarticulate way. After the first two visits, and for a while thereafter, he just took the entire situation for granted. Joe taught him card tricks, coin tricks, bits with handkerchiefs and needles and thread. They ate sandwiches brought in from the coffee shop downstairs. They shook hands in greeting and farewell. And, month after month, Tommy kept Secretman's secrets, though they were always bubbling up on his lips and trying to escape.